(birds chirping)
(water whooshing)
(soft music)
- The longest border in the world is kind of strange.
(soft music)
It goes on for thousands and thousands of miles,
in like a straight line.
And there's a bunch of weird little details about this line
that I'm becoming quite curious about.
This is the border of the United States and Canada.
(soft music)
Yeah I know, two Canada videos in a row.
I'm just really into Canada lately.
And Canada has got some weird stuff going on
and it's kind of just like neighbor to the north
that no one ever talks about
because it's seemingly just not that interesting,
but it actually is really interesting.
That's what I'm here to tell you.
So let's do this.
(upbeat music)
- How is it looking up there, Dr. Chris?
(upbeat music continues)
I spent the weekend in Vancouver, BC
hanging out with some friends.
My friends, Chris and Lizzie and Becky and Chris
who are just gems of people.
Really fun to hang out with,
very talented creators.
Iz, what are we up to? Where are we?
What's going down? You can say it loud.
Izi say it loud.
(crosstalk)
- We're getting ramen, but I'm gonna say it
- Okay ready, ready.
- [Host] Okay go - Great, three, two, one.
- [All] We're getting ramen.
- That worked out really well.
And there was lots of FPV drones.
(upbeat music)
- Did you just crash it?
- I'm very far away.
(air whooshing)
Do you hear it?
- And while on this trip,
one of the things I did while we were driving around
is what I always do,
which is, pull out my phone and started looking
at the map of where we were.
(gentle music)
- And I just started to get really curious about this line,
this straight line that goes on for thousands of kilometers.
It's like 6,500 kilometers worth of line on the map.
And I've always just ignored this line. It's kind of like,
Oh, that's just like the boring line
that separates these two countries
that are like best friends
and have no tension, no drama
or nothing interesting about this line.
It's just straight and boring is what I always thought.
Then the rabbit holes began.
(upbeat music)
There's actually some really interesting stuff
about this line like weird enclaves
and a Skype border patrol
and all this stuff
that I'll explain in just a second.
But first let's remember why I'm here.
I came to explore and to have a good time with my friends.
(upbeat music)
(crosstalk)
(upbeat music)
Okay, so back to this line.
There's a whole history here.
I don't know if you're interested
in the history lesson right now. I'm not.
So let's just put it this way.
A lot of Canada used to be owned by the French,
(typewriter clicking)
Fought some Wars with Britain,
they lost the wars and they were kind of like,
nah, we'll just like kind of surrender Canada.
French writer, Voltaire kind of hated Canada
said it was "Just a few acres of snow"
So the British take over Canada,
the United States is starting to expand to the South.
They wanna take over tons of land.
They want to go north and take over Canada,
but the British don't really want them to take over Canada
and they fight and they end up not taking over Canada.
And eventually they establish a line
between north and south that says,
this is Canada and this is United States.
Through a bunch of treaties,
they determine exactly where the line's gonna be.
(gentle music)
There's one number that completely determined
how this border would look.
And that number is actually the same name
as this coffee shop that we're in right now in Vancouver,
(gentle upbeat music)
Forty Ninth Parallel.
(gentle upbeat music)
(dry leaves cracking)
This is not stable.
I had this big vision of sitting on this log.
I don't think it's gonna work.
(exhales deeply)
Am I contributing to erosion with all of this traipsing
through the woods?
Here they go. They've got a line.
They've got a number,
the 49th Parallel.
(soft music)
This is like the 1800s, they don't have GPS.
In fact they don't have any precise tools
for actually measuring what that line looks like
when you're in the mountains of Canada.
So they send a bunch of people out with string.
They made a bunch of straight lines that were supposed
to go along the 49th Parallel.
And I mean, they did a pretty darn good job
for just like using string and compasses.
I'm actually pretty impressed,
but not surprisingly,
if you zoom into this very straight line,
you'll see that there's actually a little bit
of zigzagging going on.
The border doesn't actually go perfectly
along the 49th Parallel.
To demarcate the border,
they put thousands of these stone markings
and then they also, to make it very clear,
cut a gap in the trees that's like 20 feet wide.
It's kind of a bizarre-looking thing,
especially from space.
You just see this like gap in the trees.
(upbeat music)
To write the end of it, continental United States,
is gonna be south of the 49th Parallel
and Canada would be north of the 49th Parallel.
This is a great thing when you're looking wide at a map,
but nature isn't super good at straight lines,
which is why when we draw borders,
it kind of clashes sometimes with
how the world actually works.
And so you get some weird stuff
(upbeat music)
First over here in Vancouver, zoom into Vancouver,
and you'll see this little peninsula.
This little peninsula is great,
just like any other peninsula.
But look what happens when you draw
the 49th Parallel through it.
This is Point Roberts.
It's a little enclave that belongs to the United States
because it's South of the 49th Parallel.
But you can see that it's like, should be in Canada.
(upbeat music)
It's cut off from the US.
This little town
of like 1500 people is strange because
there are people living there who are US citizens.
They belong to the State of Washington.
(gentle upbeat music)
They have a little elementary school in this village,
but what they don't have is anything
above an elementary school.
So anyone who wants to go to school has to get on a bus,
go across the border into Canada all the way around
like 40 kilometers or something like that.
Back in the United States, go to school.
And then back across into Canada
and back into the United States.
It's like four border crossings in one day.
Sounds like a nightmare.
(upbeat music)
Listen, I know we're talking about the US-Canada border
and everything but just take a minute
to look at this mossy green forest
that I'm in north of Vancouver.
It's just the most magical thing I've ever seen.
- I'm really know far away
(both laughing)
- [Lady] So far away
- Can you hear it?
(upbeat music)
- [Host] Is everyone convinced that moss
is the greatest thing in the world yet.
- Yeah, of course.
- [Host] On the record? - I was on board.
- [Host] Yeah, you've been on board since the beginning.
- I was on board from the begins.
- [Host] You're on board now, hater.
- I'm on board.
- [Host] I've got everyone on board.
- Listen, (indistinct) the whole time
- Shut up Becky.
(upbeat music)
- Okay. So back to this line,
keep going down the straight line.
And eventually you'll hit an area where
the whole straight line,
49th Parallel thing doesn't really work
as a place to draw border.
The treaty says that as soon as this 49th parallel hits
this Lake, it's called Lake of The Woods
that the border would need
to trace the Northwest corner,
meaning the upper left corner of this border,
and then continue onward. But there was a problem.
The map they were using to draw this border
was kind of bad and inaccurate.
And so it made the lake look a lot more round
and cleaner and like more in line
with their vision for the border.
But then when they went to actually survey it,
they realized that this northwest corner of the upper left
was actually way up here,
(gentle music)
making the border have to go up to fulfill the terms
of the treaty and then continue onward.
From there it starts to follow rivers and
it goes into The Great Lakes.
And it's a little more complicated,
but in the process of going up to fulfill the treaty
and hitting the upper left of this Lake,
you get this,
(gentle upbeat music)
this little blob of land is appropriately named
The Northwest Angle.
It's the only piece of the continental United States
that is north of the 49th Parallel.
There's a couple hundred people who live there
and if they want to get in and out of their community,
they have to go to this little booth
and they have to video-call like Skype
the border patrol to like report
that they're coming in and out
and declare whatever stuff they wanna bring in and out.
That's so cool.
It's like Skype border patrol.
Sounds cool. I should do that someday.
(upbeat music)
We went into this sea-plane in Vancouver
and we flew over all of these islands.
(upbeat music)
And I started to realize that while it works
to draw these really straight lines in
the middle of Canada,
when you get to the east and the west coast in
the Canada region, you start to get a lot of little islands,
lots of water weaving in and out of violins,
cutting them all up.
And that's hard to draw lines through.
Luckily on the west coast,
they were able to not stick with the 49th Parallel,
which would have cut Vancouver Island,
just in a weird place. They dipped it down and whatever.
But over on the east side, they didn't do that.
And you end up with this line.
(upbeat music)
This is Canada, but the only way
to get into Canada from here is through
this land bridge that goes through the United States.
Kinda weird, probably not that big of a deal.
In fact, none of these are actually a big deal.
Like they're all like kind of goofy, weird things,
but they don't actually cause like too much inconvenience.
Although the high schoolers having to go through
four border crossings every day is actually pretty weird
and a huge inconvenience.
So I take back what I just said.
So it was a great weekend in Vancouver.
I loved hanging out with these wonderful people
and I learned a little something about this big,
straight line that I didn't know anything about.
And it confirmed to me something that I've learned
time and time again,
which is some lines on the map look really simple.
And they just look like straight lines,
but you zoom in enough,
you'll always find weird stuff.
So it's always interesting to zoom in
that's I guess the moral of the story.
Anyway, thanks for watching.
(upbeat music)
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